Learn how to make $5,000 a month promoting affiliate products

I have been promoting affiliate products in the past 2 years and about half of my income or $5,000 a month comes from affiliate marketing. If you are a newbie in affiliate marketing or having trouble making money with affiliate products, here are some tips for you.

1. Content - Content is by far the most important thing in affiliate marketing. You should create unique, quality and fresh content for your site. 60-70% of my traffic comes from search engine and about 85% of that comes from Google. There are few things you need to do for Google to find you.

a) Keyword research - Do some basic keyword research through Google adwords. See what kind of keywords people are searching.

b) Identify buyer keywords - There are people who are looking for information and there are people who are ready to buy. Target the buyers. Some buyer keywords include but not limited to the following

buy
purchase
best
review
model numbers
brand names
cheap

c) Information keyword - There keywords are still important as they drive a lot of traffic to your site and they may ultimately buy something. You can also put adsense on your site to make additional money.

d) On Page SEO - you should do some basic SEO on your site. I was getting good traffic before I learn SEO, but my search engine traffic almost double when I applied SEO to my site. If you are using wordpress, then you can use the All in One SEO plugin.

e) Build back links to your site and deep links.

f) presell the product. People tend to ignore banners in general and they have horrible conversion rate. Therefore, you should write something to presell the affiliate product that you are trying to promote. Another approaching is text links in a problem-solution post. You post a problem, and then insert your affiliate product as a solution to your problem.

2. Forum Marketing

- Participate in forums and be helpful. Help out other people who needed help and post
genuine replies instead of posting affiliate links. You should never post spam in any form as you will get ban quickly. Nobody likes spam and people are more likely to buy from a friend rather than a stranger, so try to become friends with other members. Have a signature that points to your site is all you need. Spend at least 1 hour a day in forums that are related to your niche.

3. Twitter Marketing

When I first started twitter marketing, I was clueless. All I can see is people post useless stuff. I tried to do the same, but failed. I tried again and failed again. The reason was I kept posting affiliate products but nobody came to my site or buy anything from me. Then I realize twitter is the same as forum, I should be more helpful to other twitters. So I did the following

a) I started to answer other people's question and gain followers. You don't need a massive list of followers to make money with twitter, you need real people to follow you and if your message really help them, they will retwit your message to their friends and it goes viral.

b) I have never use any tool to build followers or anything. The only tool I use is socialoomph which is free. I use the tool to send a direct message to my followers when they follow me. The message is of course a link to my presell page.

c) Use the twitter search to find targeted customers. For example, if your niche is weight lost or diet, you can do a search

“diet recommendations -http -www.” - this will search for people who search for diet recommendations and their twit doesn't include a link. The reason is there are a lot of other marketers on twitter who are promoting their products with a link, I want to exclude them from my search. Remember, that is an exact keyword search on twitter, you should try other phrases as well.

3. Promote your product on facebook

Facebook is a little different than twitter because there is no search function to find other people's message posted on the wall. So you need to make a lot of friends.

a) Post messages on other people's fan page and build your friend list.

b) Fans Page - after you have about 500 friends, create a fans page and ask your friends to join.

c) Market your fans page, post helpful stuff that people want or need, and post links to your presell page from time to time.

4. Article Marketing -

- Write articles and submit to ezine and other article directories. I don't use this method very often because of my writing skills. But if you are a good writer, you should use article marketing because the conversion rate is pretty high.

5. Product Selection - Last but not least, product selection is important in affiliate marketing. You may work 12 hours a day, but if you are promoting the wrong product, then you will fail no matter how hard you try.

a) Affiliate Networks - Join affiliate networks like clickbank and commissino junction. Promote only the products with good landing pages. In clickbank, promote only the products with a gravity of at least 10 and minimum commission of $30. In Commission Junction, only promote the products with a Network Earnings of 3/5 or higher.

b) Spy On your competitor - Do a Google search and see what your competitors are promoting. If they are promoting a product heavily and constantly, chances are the product is a good one to promote, so you should try to product it too.

As you can see, I'm not a good writer and English is not my first language, if I can make money promoting, then you can too. On top of all that, hard working and persistence is the key. If you are a guy who gave up easily, then affiliate marketing is not for you.

I hope you learn something from my post. If not, I'm sorry to waste your time. Good Luck!